42
If nothing’s wrong with him,” Eileen told her own doctor, when she went in about a shortness of breath she’d been experiencing, “I’m going to divorce him. I can’t take it anymore.”
Dr. Aitken told her to bring her husband in. She sold it to Ed as his annual checkup, that she’d like him to try her doctor, and when he didn’t object in spite of having gone in for a checkup less than six months before, she knew she was doing the right thing. They sat in the discordant placidity of the waiting area before she led him into the examining room and went back out. She’d blustered about divorce, but now she saw that she would put up with anything in exchange for hearing that her husband had simply become an asshole.
After spending half an hour with Ed, Dr. Aitken came out to meet her.
“Don’t divorce him yet,” he said, handing her a referral to a neurology team he trusted.
? ? ?
She braced for the fit she expected Ed to throw once they got to Montefiore, but he sat docilely again on the papered, padded table, waiting for the doctor to arrive. His big, fleshy back looked like raw dough.
First came blood tests and a physical exam. Dr. Khalifa, the lead doctor, wanted to eliminate anything that might cause memory loss, so he checked Ed’s thyroid levels, as thyroid problems had run in his family. They gave him a CT scan.
His thyroid was fine. The CT scan showed no sign of a tumor.
She took him back for diagnostic exams. Dr. Khalifa sat Ed at a table and took a seat opposite him. She sat in the extra chair and felt nervous for Ed, as though she were about to watch his debut in a theatrical production that had limped toward opening night.
Dr. Khalifa told Ed to count backwards from one hundred. Ed got to ninety-seven before pausing. “Eighty-six,” he said, then ran off a few other numbers in accurate succession, until he jumped another decile, at which point Dr. Khalifa stopped him.
The obstreperousness she’d anticipated was starting to seem like a fantasy. Ed looked vulnerable and small. He was smiling, trying to ingratiate himself with his examiner, perhaps in unconscious pursuit of mercy in the diagnosis.
Dr. Khalifa told him to draw three concentric circles, and Ed put a good one down on the page, then drew another that was ovoid and attached to the first like a chain link. The third, a shaky line meeting finally in something more like a quadrangle than a circle, sat apart from the first two.
“Great, that’s great,” Dr. Khalifa said dully when Ed was done. The doctor was a picture of imperviousness. She watched his eyes: he betrayed no sign of surprise, gave away no clues as to whether this was a normal result or not, the product of mere aging or something more sinister. She didn’t know whether she herself would have been able to draw the concentric circles. Certainly it would be difficult under this kind of scrutiny. She had a sensation that she was watching a child take a test, and she felt a sympathy with Ed that made her question her decision to expose him to this. What right did she have to subject him in the quiddities of his middle age to a man who would be looking for any sign of deviation from a norm that was probably arbitrary in the first place? She wanted to whisk him back home and let him go at things in his own way. A category existed to describe men like him, a time-tested, venerated one at that: absentminded professor.
“I’m not an artist,” Ed said, laughing. “You should see my drawings of the digestive system.”
The doctor chuckled.
“This could be something abstract,” Ed said.
Dr. Khalifa looked at it and shook his head. She didn’t like his attitude. He was too glib, too detached. His hair was too perfect, his teeth gleamed too white. She had long wished Ed had pursued medical school, but now she felt she’d been too hard on him in her mind. She knew doctors like this at work; they thought they walked on water. The work Ed did might not have been as lucrative or flashy, but it laid the groundwork for guys like this to come to their conclusions. If Ed said nothing was wrong, then most likely nothing was wrong. She had insulted him by bringing him before this cipher who didn’t deserve to carry his briefcase, let alone pass judgment on him.
“We’re almost done with this part,” Dr. Khalifa said. “One more question and then I’m going to have you do some physical things.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me something. Do you know who the current president is?”
If he wanted to insult him, this was a perfect way to do it. She almost wanted Ed to answer sarcastically or deliberately incorrectly, but she didn’t want the doctor to have the satisfaction of writing it down on that little pad of his.
Ed sat with it; maybe he was coming up with a witty riposte.
“I know it’s a Republican,” he said. “I know that.”
“Can you tell me his name?”
Ed pulled on his chin. “Reagan?” he asked. “Is it Reagan? I can see his face. It’s not Reagan, is it? This is embarrassing.”
“You know this, Ed,” she said. The doctor gave her a look; she wanted to smack his face.
“I can see him,” Ed said. “I just can’t recall the name.”
Dr. Khalifa wrote something down. She wanted to call the answer out. The whole thing was so stupid. She couldn’t believe he was letting him dangle there like this. Ed looked ruined, as if he had failed a test not merely of memory but of character.
“Give it a second,” Dr. Khalifa said. “Sometimes it’s hard to think of a given thing when you have to. Think of something else. It might come to you.”
“White elephants,” Ed said.
“Something like that.”
Ed rubbed the top of his head, as if to massage the answer from his scalp. He let out a deep sigh. “I can’t remember,” he said. “Who is it?”
“Bush,” the doctor said. “George Bush.”
“Yes! That’s it! I knew it. God, I knew it! I could see his face. Of course! His running mate. It’s easy to confuse them.”
The doctor said nothing, just continued to write on his pad.
She thought of the time she’d had to memorize the presidents and their dates of service. She remembered Sister Alberta calling them up one by one to the front of the room to answer one question each, Sister asking her which president followed Teddy Roosevelt. So many W names surrounded Roosevelt—to this day she could remember them: William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding. Though she had memorized them conscientiously, at that moment they ran together in her mind. She was terrified of being called stupid in front of the class. Her heart began to race; then her mind went blank, so she could picture only the hazy outlines of names. “Now, Miss Tumulty,” Sister said, and when Eileen said,“William Wilson,” laughter exploded in the room.
“You’re right,” she said. “It is easy to confuse them.”
Ed looked guiltily at her, as if she were on Dr. Khalifa’s side and not his. She shifted her chair closer to him. The doctor seemed to write endlessly.
“Just one more thing I have to get down here,” he said, holding up a finger as he wrote. “Perfect. Now I’d like you to change into shorts. I’m going to have you do some exercises for me.”
They went into the next room and she helped him change. It felt like she was getting him ready for gym class. She wondered what humiliations awaited him. Dr. Khalifa came in and had him touch his toes from a standing position and rise from a seated one. He had him jog in place. He took notes throughout. Ed looked to her between exercises. She tried to give encouragement. When Dr. Khalifa told him to touch his finger to the tip of his nose, Ed had a hard time doing it.
“I’m not drunk,” he said. “I promise. Although I might get drunk after this.”